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The Stelliferous Era
The Stelliferous Era was the second era of the Universe. It started 3.8x105 (380,000) years after the Big Bang, and is the era you are currently in. It will continue for another 10-100 Trillion (1013-14) years or so. To fully understand some parts of this, you should read the page about The Primordial Era. The Universe Structure Formation After Recombination (the end of the primordial era), the Quantum Fluctuations before inflation that caused certain regions of the Universe to be 0.001% denser become important. Gravity slowly attracts matter towards these regions. In these regions, gravity began to pull hydrogen atoms together to form Gas Clouds. These gas clouds began to form clusters, and these clusters began to form larger clusters called Superclusters. The Universe became a web of superclusers of these proto-galaxies. Black Hole Stars These proto-galaxies were technically proto-stars, but the Universe was very dense, and they gained material rapidly. When their size exceeded 100x the Sun's mass, they collapsed into Black Holes, and as more material fell towards these Black Holes, the Black Hole slowly gained mass, releasing energy and lighting up the surrounding material, creating the first Stars. These unusual Black Hole-Powered thousand Solar Mass stars are known as Quasi Stars. Their diameter is 10 Billion Kilometers, over 4x larger than the largest stars we know today. They lasted for 7 million years, before the central black holes swallowed all their material, causing them to grow in size. This is our best explanation for how supermassive black holes formed. The Universe is now 10-100 Million years old. Early Galaxy Formation So now we have Supermassive Black Holes. These black holes started a chain reaction, where material was attracted to them via gravity, falling in to them, causing them to grow. Their gravity got stronger, attracting more material, feeding the Black Hole, forming an Acretion Disk of material around the Black Hole, causing it to glow really brightly. Once the black hole stopped accreting material, it was already millions of times more massive than the sun, and there was a disk of hydrogen around them. Galaxies were born. Early Star Formation So now that we have galaxies, the disk of material was in orbit around the black hole, driven by Dark Matter. The Hydrogen slowly coalesced into stars, forming the stars we know and love today. The Universe is now about 4x108 (400 Million) years old. Assuming you know how stars die, they either strip back their outer layers and form a Planetary Nebula or blow them off in a Supernova. The point - A lot of the hydrogen in the stars gets thrown back into the galaxy, allowing it to form new stars. Material around a newborn star can coalesce into planets. Galaxies slowly grow by consuming smaller galaxies. Our Own Solar System 5x109 (5 Billion Years) ago, a star formed. This star was completely normal, and it was the Sun. However, it is a bit special, as life somehow formed on one of the planets (Earth), and we have not found life anywhere else. It is not known how life formed, but there are alot of theories. One is that soon after the Earth formed, it collided with a Mars-Sized planet, forming the Moon and eventually life. Another is that the chemicals in the asteroids that collided with Earth during the Late Heavy Bombardment contained ingredients for life. Another is that it emerged on another planet and a rock from that planet ended up on earth, starting life. The Last Stars One day, the galaxy will be filled with stellar remnants, and run out of Hydrogen fuel. This will happen in a few trillion years. When the last red dwarf stars die a few trillion years after that, there will be no stars left, and the stelliferous era comes to an end. We enter the Degenerate Era.